


Lex Talionis

by boychik



Category: Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: Abuse, Gen, Slavery, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-06
Updated: 2013-03-06
Packaged: 2017-12-04 12:43:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/710917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boychik/pseuds/boychik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"An eye for an eye"...or is it?</p><p>In which Morgiana attempts a murder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lex Talionis

Morgiana’s hand is sweaty on the knife. It’s trembling, casting a wavering silhouette across the floor. The cold light of the moon pours into Jamil’s bedchamber and floods across the grey stone floor and the Oriental rug. The posts on his canopy bed cast long, deep shadows that slice the moonlight into bright swaths. The base of his bed is an ornate crush of creatures carved in bas relief. Their spines are twisted into impossible curves and their limbs are all tangled up, paws and fins and fingers bending at unnatural angles. Humans and animals have their mouths open in silent screams. Jamil’s hair is loose, spread across the pillow in a short dark fan. The moonlight catches on his features. Seeing him like this, mouth half-open, cheek slack and silvered in the eerie light, Jamil almost lives up to his name. His breathing is easy under silk sheets. 

Morgiana can’t move.

Oh, but she has to.

She has to be fast and strong and brave enough to do it. She has to put an end to her misery, armed only with the memories of a vast plain and the single blade dangling over his throat.

She’s pictured it a million times in her head. She’s seen Jamil choke on his own shit, seen Jamil with a broken nose, blood dripping from so many gashes in his face she couldn’t even see his eyes, seen Jamil beaten, in chains, enslaved…she hates herself for having these twisted thoughts in her head, breaking fast and violent in her mind like a tidal wave. The more they crop up, the more she tries to beat them down. That’s why she knows she must act. To exact justice. To do the best thing for everyone.

If she waits too long, she’ll see the red sun rising in the distance, the same color of the eyes of her brothers and sisters. The same color of the pulse thumping like a thunderous herd through her head and heart.

The canopy flutters like the wings of some great gossamer beast. Tassels swing from the intricately patterned cloth like the hourly gong swinging back and forth in the belly of a clock. Morgiana can’t stop trembling. If she drops the knife, the moon will flash radiant on one side of the blade and it will clatter on the stone floor. Jamil will wake up, rise from his fearful bed, and grow enormous before her. His hands will close around her neck and she’ll feel that blood and flesh, the power of the Fanalis clan, drain away to nothing in his palms. There will be only Jamil’s face blocking out the moon and the bed and the sky as she dies. Mocking, sneering, the ugliest face she’s ever seen, cruel and twisted and laden with jewels. As his fingers crush her windpipe she is first solid, then translucent, then just a body on the floor, stripped and leaking blood. She’ll see a tunnel of black that fades into white into nothing at all. To die is to become invisible.

Dead, dead, it can’t be…

Morgiana can’t picture death as any worse than pain, but it can’t be a whole lot better.

She palms the knife, as it’s starting to slip. Would it be unjust for her to act? Jamil would throw her life away in a heartbeat if he could gain any advantage…Jamil who has beaten her from girlhood, spit at her and chained her and laughed mercilessly when she was two feet tall and huddled in the dark corners of a cell…Isn’t it the basic human measure to exact revenge? That old biblical phrase from brighter days swims to mind. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. You stripped me of my freedom, I’ll strip you of yours…You’d think it a cruel release, but it’d almost absolve you, if you just lost your life…

These thoughts are swirling through the thick fog of her mind when she hears the clatter of a pebble at Jamil’s window.

Who could it be? A secret message for the chief? Some assassin in the dead of night? Morgiana realizes as she turns, knife raised and ready to attack some unknown assailant, that she’s spent a decade defending Jamil. She can’t let him die. It’s hopeless to think that she’d be able to kill Jamil. Nothing but a fever dream she’s acting out in the dead of night, a trance broken by a single pebble…His words float over her brain, whispered, screamed: “Good girl, Morgiana, that’s my girl…” She smoothes her dress. Puts the knife away. Her mouth is dry. How could she kill him? She could never take his life.

She can’t let him die. If he wakes, she will die. Morgiana turns and runs away, out of Jamil’s room and down the stone halls of the palace. She runs through endless corridors, dark and lit only by intervals of small, fiery sconces. The chain drags behind her like an anchor. She is still running.


End file.
